Ecological civilization in the mountains: how walnuts boomed and busted in southwest China

As projects of commodification and environmental protection converge, it is crucial to understand how authoritarian states attempt to secure commodities, conservation, and control in internal peripheries. We examine how state authorities in China have incorporated walnut cultivation into a project of ‘building ecological civilization’ that links rural development with environmental protection and national security priorities, drawing on fieldwork in rural communities to show how local state agents and smallholders met efforts to promote walnuts. This unconventional crop boom – state-driven, centered on a traditional crop, without dispossession – sputtered amid global market fluctuations, local capital constraints, and friction with cultivators and landscapes.